Daily Archives: November 2, 2011

I have no idea what happened to day, but the trudging I was feeling this morning when I was writing my NaNo Novel went away. When I wrote here this morning I had 1811 words behind me; right now, the count is 2990, and while that’s not as much as what I had earlier, it’s coming in little bursts of creativity: 200 words here, 300 there, 90 elsewhere. And it’s all adding up, because now my word count is 7200 total over two days.

An I’ll probably add enough wordage to get it to 7500 before I call it a night.

My mind changed somewhere today while I was writing. It might have been just walking away from the computer about 9 AM, because I was feeling worn and my head was spinning; maybe it was showing my second scene to a couple of people and getting good feed back on the action. (Trusty Editortm read the scene and said something along the lines of, “These characters are more secretly badassed.” Yeah, I’ll take that.)

Maybe it’s because something click inside my head and things came into focus. I know they did when I started working on the next scene, because I’ve seen the location in my head for a long time, and the words are coming easier. For me, when I gotta kick the action, it takes me a bit to roll up the visual in my head and put it into words.

But never the less, it’s coming. 7200 right now, maybe 10k tomorrow. I know I can do 50k by the end of the month–maybe the middle of the month. The important thing is getting that “The End” on the last scene and editing the hell out of it.

Yeah, you know, this writing thing . . . you work your butt off, coming up with good ideas, and it seems so right in your head, but when it comes time to put it into the computer, why is it my fingers don’t type what I want them to type?

Day two of NaNoWriMo and it had the feel of trudging through a swamp. It was an action scene, and I always seem to have issues writing action scenes. It was a fun scene; there was someone blowing up, someone getting run through, someone cut in half with a whip (yeah, you heard that right), someone decapitated. There were bullets and swords and BFGs and even a fireball.

But writing seemed to go slow. I seemed like my fingers didn’t want to hit the right keys; it felt like I couldn’t get the words to fit right in my head. And I was editing. I know you’re not suppose to with NaNo, but hey: I don’t care. When I write I try to edit, and I was and did, and that’s all there is to that.

Still, I rolled out 1811 words today, and I did that in 85 minutes, and when you look at the tale of the tape, that’s 1278 words/hour, and even though I might think that’s shabby, there are people who would slam me over the head with their computer to get those kind of rates.

And I will get into the story again later. I’m done with the first two scenes in Scrivener, and I’m ready to start the next, which is where Alice (or in this case, Jeannette) finds out how far the rabbit hole actually goes. It’s a bit of freak out time on both sides, and I’m introducing characters incrementally, which really feels good. So figure I’ll dump another 1500 to 2000 words before I sulk off to bed, finish with 3000 to 3500 words, and consider the possibility that I’m going to be looking at 10,000 words total by the time I finish up tomorrow.

And that is what they call fast.

Now, yes: I know there are some people who shot out 10,000, 11,000, even 12,000 words yesterday in an orgy of creativity and typing. There was a time when I could do that; this isn’t that time, however. So getting 3 to 4 thousand words a day–yeah, I feel okay about that.

Because as someone pointed out yesterday, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And I’m noticing something about my novel: while I’m quite certain I’m going to pop 50k before the month is out, I’m probably going to need 65 to 70 thousand to tell the story. Hey, I can do that, right? Good, ’cause I’m doing it anyway.

So things going well. No real declension here, and I have to kick myself in the butt to keep from thinking that’s the case.

Oh, and as a service: I’m writing in Scrivener and the only thing that sort of drives me crazy about it is there’s no thesaurus, and I loves me some thesaurus, so I’ve been using the online dictionaries a lot. Which ones, you say?

What Has Gone Before

Check the Past by Date

It’s been a while since I’ve spoken with you. Perhaps speak isn’t the correct way to put things, but it works for me. In a way, I am speaking to you: I’m dictating this with Dragon software. It seems in the past couple of days Dragon has learned my idiosyncrasies far better than before, and […]